The rise of HTML5 - not just an inspirational drama, but also a palace drama

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HTML5 is popular. In the past two years, browser manufacturers have announced their support for HTML5, developers have announced their switch to HTML5 development, and HTML5 game manufacturers and HTML5 game engine providers have also received at least tens of millions of dollars in financing.

HTML5 is really popular. So what exactly is HTML5?

As we all know, our entire Internet is composed of countless web pages, and the essence of web pages is the hypertext markup language HTML. It can be said that HTML is the cornerstone of the Internet.

With the development of the times, our demands on the Internet are increasing, but the HTML standard, which serves as the cornerstone, is still at HTML4 from the 1990s.

Outdated technology could not meet our needs, so we turned to third-party multimedia frameworks such as Flash to make our websites more cool; we also developed various apps to allow us to enjoy Internet services on mobile terminals. At this time, just like Sun Wukong in the movie "The Return of the Great Sage", the fifth major revision of HTML -

HTML5 has returned with many advantages:

1. It allows you to play multimedia elements directly on the page, so you can forget about third-party plugins;

2. Its web attributes bring cross-platform capabilities. Once developed, it can be universally applied to various systems and terminals.

3. It is more semantic, standardized and easier to use;

4. Local storage;

5. It also has real-time update capabilities, and users only need to refresh to get the latest content;

6. It makes the content searchable by search engines, which is good for SEO;

7. Compared with native APP, it makes your product easy to distribute without installation;

…

With so many coveted advantages, HTML5 is bound to be popular. So who created HTML5? How did it rise?

The story begins with a tragedy. In 1997, after the release of HTML4, W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) announced the end of HTML version iteration and disbanded the HTML working group, turning to the development of the more rigorous XHTML standard. The reason is that the HTML standard is too "tolerant". Even if there are a few errors in your HTML web page, the browser will still ensure that the page can be displayed correctly through automatic error correction.

Therefore, no one will ever correct the mistakes. XHTML is strict and does not allow errors in pages. W3C tried to use strict standards to make the development of the Internet more standardized. Although the starting point is good, the effect is not good, because the use of XHTML standards will cause 99% of HTML pages on the Internet to need to be rewritten. In 2004, browser manufacturers such as Opera, Mozilla Foundation, and Apple formed the private organization WHATWG and began to try to develop the next generation of HTML with backward compatibility under the more "tolerant" traditional HTML framework.

While W3C was still debating whether to use XHTML2 or HTML5, the Internet landscape had already changed.

Around 2005, with the popularization of broadband and the improvement of computer performance, people were no longer satisfied with just using the Internet to read news and send emails.

As a result, streaming video and web games, which consume higher bandwidth, were born. HTML missed this opportunity, and this new demand was met by browser plug-ins, namely Flash.

After Adobe acquired Macromedia, it made a lot of money through Flash, which made Google, Apple and other browser manufacturers, which are the chair units of W3C, very unwilling.

In October 2006, WHATWG made a breakthrough in HTML. In order to quickly regain the market share seized by Adobe, W3C decided to stop working on XHTML and work with WHATWG to jointly promote the development of the next generation of HTML that can play multimedia on mobile terminals without plug-ins.

In 2008, the first HTML5 draft was born. In the same year, several major browser giants, including IE, Chrome, FireFox, and Safari, began to support HTML5 one after another.

In 2010, Steve Jobs publicly banned Flash and supported HTML5, which completely curbed the development of Flash.

The advent of the mobile Internet era has made the advantages of HTML5 more prominent.

In 2011, due to the widespread support of HTML5 by mobile browsers and the strong rejection of Flash by iOS, Adobe had to announce that it would stop developing Flash players for mobile devices. This year, HTML5 was in full swing. According to statistics, 34% of the top 100 websites in the world were using HTML5. Disney also spent a huge amount of money to acquire an HTML5 game engine developer in the same year, intending to create HTML5 games to avoid the control of Apple's App Store and its 30% share. HTML5 had a bright future, but it was unexpected that it would experience a huge storm.

Many big companies are promoting the development of HTML5, and Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg is the most enthusiastic. As a technology geek, he vows to use HTML5's Web APP to break the monopoly of iOS and Android.

After Facebook joined W3C, it took the lead in establishing the MobileWeb Working Group. The goal of this group is to enable Web apps developed with HTML5 to achieve the experience of native apps.

At the same time, Facebook developed its own Web APP using HTML5, hoping that this would prevent it from being controlled by Apple and Android. However, the result was that the user experience of the Web APP was extremely poor, far behind the native APPs of competitors such as Twitter.

In 2012, Zuckerberg announced that Facebook would abandon HTML5 and develop apps in a purely native way. His statement that "betting on HTML5 was Facebook's biggest mistake" completely put HTML5 into the cold palace.

The author believes that in 2012, HTML5 does not have the ability to develop excellent mobile apps.

On the one hand, external conditions are not met, such as insufficient hardware performance and browser kernel support for HTML5;

On the one hand, HTML5 technology itself is still imperfect;

Another aspect is the lack of ability of engineers.

In the same year, the HTML5 standard setters W3C and WHATWG also said that they could no longer cooperate. The former hoped to set a dead standard and never revise it after it was promulgated; the latter hoped that the standard could be adjusted dynamically with the development of the market and technology. The former had the support of Microsoft, while the latter had the support of Apple and Google. In addition, Apple, which had always been a staunch supporter of HTML5, no longer allowed pure Web APP shells to log in to the App Store.

HTML5 was the vanguard when Flash was killed, but after Flash was killed on mobile devices, Apple wanted to maintain the huge interests of its own closed ecosystem. Therefore, if you look closely, the rise of HTML5 is not only an inspirational drama, but also a palace drama.

After the two shocks mentioned above, HTML5 was silent for a while. Some people ridiculed it, and some people laughed at it, as if HTML5 was dead. But during this period, HTML5 still showed strong vitality. The many advantages it brought always attracted developers to continue exploring.

Finally, at the end of October 2014, W3C announced that HTML5 was finalized after 8 years.

I think this timing is just right:

First, from the A5 processor of the iPhone 4S in 2011 to the A8 processor of the iPhone 6, Apple officially claims that the speed has increased by about 7.5 times. This 7.5-fold speed increase has smoothed out too many performance issues;

Secondly, the support for HTML5 by Apple and Android operating systems and various browsers has become better and better over time;

Finally, after the accumulation of time, a large number of HTML5 development engines and tools emerged in 2014, paving the way for the explosion of HTML5.

Now, with the popularity of "Surround the Crazy Cat" on WeChat Moments, people have started to pay attention to HTML5 again. And as all the conditions are met, HTML5 has shown a tendency to spread like wildfire and has become completely popular.

Looking at the development of HTML5 standards so far, it can be said that it is a process of constant game of commercial interests. Its birth is not only to meet people's needs, but also to achieve the purpose of reshuffle and redistribution of interests. Its strength is not only to benefit the world, but also to defeat competitors. As a result, the giants have created a powerful HTML5 for their own purposes. Its rise means that change is coming. Whoever can make better use of it in this change will have the upper hand.

So how should we view this change?

As a new set of standards, HTML5 represents the trend and future of mobile Internet. Almost everyone can foresee its huge potential. However, it is difficult to predict how it will be implemented in various fields, how it will change people's lives or change the industry format. This requires us to continue to explore and think.

How high the ceiling of HTML5 is is determined by each of us practitioners.

The second half of HTML5's rise depends on us.